Tag: Genre: Essay Films

  • Nora Alter on Sans Soleil

    Nora Alter on Sans Soleil

    After a second viewing, I still needed some help wrapping my brain around the structure of Marker’s Sans Soleil. The following is a summary of useful ideas from Nora Alter’s book, Chris Marker.

  • Calls to Conscience and Action

    Calls to Conscience and Action

    Varda, as much an essayist as filmmaker, explores gleaning as a hypertext of ideas: gleaning is an alternate economy; at times it’s a moral choice, at others a lamentable necessity; it’s both transgressive and communal; and, finally, it’s a metaphor for the artistic process itself.

  • Week in Review

    Week in Review

    With apologies to Nick Hornby. While reading The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from The Believer, two things occurred to me.

  • From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)

    From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)

    Journals is at its best, I think, when Rappaport intertwines the lives and loves of Seberg, Jane Fonda, and Vanessa Redgrave. All are of the same age, all made films directed by their husbands (another of the film’s more interesting concerns), and all participated actively in radical political movements.